The Silver Link

Until her father died, Adela Carstairs had lived in a secure and loving home. Then happiness was shattered when her mother remarries a cruel, hard-drinking man. With her younger brother and sister, Adela is forced to flee his drunken rages and they escape to London where they seek refuge in the squalor of the back streets. Addie's desperate hope is that her childhood companions, the Mallory twins, will find and rescue them. When all three find themselves caught up in the danger and terror of revolutionary France, the twins prove invaluable. It was to be an experience which would test their friendship, and love, to the limit.

Gresley’s A4 Pacifics are arguably the most famous locomotives ever built, a status cemented by Mallard’s record breaking run on the 3rd July ‘38. And yet only a year later the glamorous ‘streaks’ seemed likely to be cast into obscurity by the coming of another world war. So, for only four exhilarating years they were allowed to flourish as their creator had intended and in that time captured the imagination of railwaymen and public alike. With the help of previously unpublished material the author analyses the complex evolution of the A4s - a project that began in 1911 when Gresley was appointed as Locomotive Superintendent of the Great Northern Railway. It is a story with many strands to consider – war, peace and war again, engineering and art, politics and business, recession and social change, the growth of the media and consumerism, the struggle for professional reputations and a growing, deeply damaging international rivalry. All these elements are captured in the story of the A4s in the heady days before conflict ended their brief golden age and Gresley’s life came to an end.

Teenagers Felice and Tim, both with tragedy in their backgrounds, suffer from psychological problems, and, with the help of psychiatry and each other, become more independent, caring persons.